Home schooling High School: What High School Information Do you Really need to Retain?

Colleges will want to see a transcript. A transcript is an valuable thing to have even if your children will not be heading away to college because eventually, somewhere, somehow, someone is going to ask you for one. Be sure that you have a transcript that includes the course names, the credits and grades.

Often colleges will need to see a reading list, also. A reading list is just a listing of books that your student has read. It isn't a reading bibliography. So as long as you have the author's name as well as the title of the books that you have read you should be just fine.

A number of colleges, if not most colleges prefer to see course descriptions also. A course description is really just a one paragraph descriptive essay of what you taught in a class. This shouldn't be scary or complicated either because a descriptive essay is something that we teach our kids how to do beginning at fifth grade. It is really just a fifth grade writing assignment. I know you can do that.

Some other kinds of information that colleges might want is a little more varied. For instance, some colleges will ask for samples from a class. I cannot tell you what class it is going to be given that each college will ask for something unique. What I normally recommend is that people make an attempt to retain a couple samples from every class.

You will need to have a wide assortment of samples. In your math class, you may wish to keep math tests, you will need to keep a few science lab write-ups for science classes, and you might keep that paragraph they wrote in French, or their menus and recipes from their culinary arts class. Try to keep something from each class because I was a bit surprised at the things that the college admission people were asking me for. It came as a surprise and I was really relieved that I had a sample from each class.